How does your Mage deal with Meng the Demented Cowardice?

I might have posted this in the Raid Encounter forum so forgive me if this kind of seems out of place.

I feel like Fire Mages in the Spirit Kings encounter have a high potential for dying (or straight dps loss) on Meng the Demented during the "Cowardice" phase of the fight. This is more likely with sub-par healers and even more likely with good crit RNG with lots of Pyroblasts either risked being used or wasted.... either way it's bad.

So I'm asking specifically raiding normal/heroic Mages: how do YOU deal with the Cowardice at high stacks? Is it simpler than I think? I've considered slowing or outright stopping deeps, saving Ice Barrier, Lock Rock and Evocate for this part? All those things do reduce dps, so I'd love to hear more advanced ideas on how to maintain deeps while decreasing the likelihood of dying.

Well Ice Barrier prevents push back so you are going to want to put that up anyways.
If your mage is running invocation or RoP then glyph of Evocate is not wasted dps time either
Altertime with all CD's up and full health is good, it will return the mage to the same HP he/she had once it expires.

I just make sure to have Ice Barrier ready for when the heavy dmg comes, then after that one dissapates I pop talented invisibilty. If I would be lucky and get a good ignite during this just use combustion and be fucking ready to Ice Block!

Alter Time restores health, that's right. I always use it for Pyroblast burst but on Meng yeah that seems like a good move. Good one pyrostorm.

It works well in pvp for that reason It will free you from any stun or snare you get in after it was used and restore your health. It doesn't work if your silenced when it runs out after 6 seconds though.

I just make sure to have Ice Barrier ready for when the heavy dmg comes, then after that one dissapates I pop talented invisibilty. If I would be lucky and get a good ignite during this just use combustion and be fucking ready to Ice Block!

So, I think I"m getting the jist of this..... save all defensive CDs for this part of the bossfight and chain them one after another. lol

Unlike everyone else here, I'm going to recommend that you just stop DPS.

Even if you have 2 of them up (on heroic), Meng does not pose any threat while he's active. The 10 minute enrage should not be a problem either if people don't screw up the mechanics.

By pushing DPS on Meng with high stacks of Cowardice, you are putting yourself at risk, or stressing out the healers, and for what? So you can top DPS charts on a fight that essentially has no enrage timer? If people are going to use logs to criticize your DPS on that fight, you should turn around and link to them the reflect damage they took from Cowardice.

Anyways, personally when Cowardice gets to about 60% damage reflect, I just evocate. If there's another boss up, I swap targets to DPS the other boss until Cowardice falls off.

EDIT: On LFR and Normal, I don't think anyone will care, you can just use your defensive CD's.

Forgive my ignorance I thought the Cowardice buff was on the boss not on the player.... is there a debuff linked with it that goes on the player that is dispellable?

yeah, heres how it works. when you hit the boss, you reflect damage back to yourself of a % equal to his current energy bar (while in Cowardice phase obviously). however, the damage reflection is applied as a 6 second long dispellable magic debuff, very similar to our own Ignite. If you hit the boss with multiple pyros or have big dots rolling, just shout for a dispel right after you hit him. On my warlock (my main), i've thrown 500k chaos bolts at him while he had 95% cowardice energy, but as long as you get a quick dispel you'll be right as rain.
The primary reason why a lot of people don't know this is the dot is instantly re-applied as soon as you deal more damage, obviously, and the entire raid has it, so no one ever considers it a dispel priority; it would simply be too much to keep up with and healing is a lot easier. but if one or two people KNOW they're going to have extraordinarily large dot stacks, you can call for a dispel and get it cleared right off.

(Disclaimer: this info applies to normal mode. no idea if its dispellable or even a DoT on heroic.)

yeah, heres how it works. when you hit the boss, you reflect damage back to yourself of a % equal to his current energy bar (while in Cowardice phase obviously). however, the damage reflection is applied as a 6 second long dispellable magic debuff, very similar to our own Ignite. If you hit the boss with multiple pyros or have big dots rolling, just shout for a dispel right after you hit him. On my warlock (my main), i've thrown 500k chaos bolts at him while he had 95% cowardice energy, but as long as you get a quick dispel you'll be right as rain.
The primary reason why a lot of people don't know this is the dot is instantly re-applied as soon as you deal more damage, obviously, and the entire raid has it, so no one ever considers it a dispel priority; it would simply be too much to keep up with and healing is a lot easier. but if one or two people KNOW they're going to have extraordinarily large dot stacks, you can call for a dispel and get it cleared right off.

(Disclaimer: this info applies to normal mode. no idea if its dispellable or even a DoT on heroic.)

Unlike everyone else here, I'm going to recommend that you just stop DPS.

Even if you have 2 of them up (on heroic), Meng does not pose any threat while he's active. The 10 minute enrage should not be a problem either if people don't screw up the mechanics.

By pushing DPS on Meng with high stacks of Cowardice, you are putting yourself at risk, or stressing out the healers, and for what? So you can top DPS charts on a fight that essentially has no enrage timer? If people are going to use logs to criticize your DPS on that fight, you should turn around and link to them the reflect damage they took from Cowardice.

Anyways, personally when Cowardice gets to about 60% damage reflect, I just evocate. If there's another boss up, I swap targets to DPS the other boss until Cowardice falls off.

EDIT: On LFR and Normal, I don't think anyone will care, you can just use your defensive CD's.

I second this, pyroblast crits way too hard for you to risk dps'ing him on high stacks

Unlike everyone else here, I'm going to recommend that you just stop DPS.

Even if you have 2 of them up (on heroic), Meng does not pose any threat while he's active. The 10 minute enrage should not be a problem either if people don't screw up the mechanics.

By pushing DPS on Meng with high stacks of Cowardice, you are putting yourself at risk, or stressing out the healers, and for what? So you can top DPS charts on a fight that essentially has no enrage timer? If people are going to use logs to criticize your DPS on that fight, you should turn around and link to them the reflect damage they took from Cowardice.

Anyways, personally when Cowardice gets to about 60% damage reflect, I just evocate. If there's another boss up, I swap targets to DPS the other boss until Cowardice falls off.

EDIT: On LFR and Normal, I don't think anyone will care, you can just use your defensive CD's.

Even though I'm frost, I'd have to agree with stop dpsing or at the very least don't cast hard hitting spells, especially when you have no defensives to save you. I found out the hard way last night with my first night on heroic kings. Was not expecting that much reflect, in normal it wasn't hardly noticeable with IB/TS but wow yeaa...

We either mass dispel when the damage reflect percent gets too high, or you just stop DPSing if you don't have the cooldowns to burn on yourself. Heroic 25, btw. I'll usually save temporal shield for when the reflect starts hitting 85% or so, and ice block if our mass dispels are unavailable.